Russia did not ‘block’ Syria draft statement at UN – Foreign Ministry

A man gestures as he calls for help at a site hit by what activists said was an air strike from forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Tareek Al-Bab area of Aleppo, December 18, 2013. (Reuters / Saad Abobrahim)

The UN Security Council failed Thursday to adopt a statement on the recent civilian deaths in Syria. The US-proposed draft had condemned Damascus for indiscriminate attacks on Aleppo, but the Americans would not accept Russia’s balancing amendments.

The failure to settle differences and come up with a statement
was described by some American diplomats as Russia “blocking” a
statement that condemned violence.

"We are very disappointed that a Security Council statement
expressing our collective outrage at the brutal and
indiscriminate tactics employed by the Syrian regime against
civilians has been blocked," Reuters reported Kurtis Cooper,
a spokesman for the US mission to the UN, as saying.

The draft statement would express "deep concern at the
escalating level of violence in the Syrian conflict and condemned
all violence by all parties" and "outrage" at
Syrian government
airstrikes that the text said killed over 100 people,
including many children, Cooper said.

While Cooper did not directly blame Russia for the
“blocking,” several other diplomats, speaking on
condition of anonymity, said Moscow was the intended target of
the comments.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has rejected the Western narrative
in an official statement, saying that the draft statement
proposed by the US did not have “a single word about
mentioning the crimes committed by the armed opposition groups,
including the use of civilians as ‘human shields’ in order to
defend occupied settlements, attack medical institutions and
infrastructure facilities.”

The statement said that the facts on the ground were ignored in
the draft which was based only “on mass media reports and
anonymous ’human rights activists’,” while noting that the
amendments proposed by Russia were flatly rejected. The
“genuine circumstances of the incident” were unclear
with no proper investigation conducted.

“Russia's delegation made constructive amendments to the
document's text in order to make it more balanced. They were
rejected,” the ministry said.

Russia has long maintained the position that the government of
Syrian President Bashar Assad cannot be solely blamed for the
ongoing violence in Syria. Moscow insists that any UN Security
Council document condemning Damascus would also mention the
violence on the part of opposition forces.

Western members of the security body tend to put the majority of
the blame on the Assad forces. The draft statement rejected
Thursday was focusing on the use of air force and artillery by
the Syrian army.

The outrage was directed at the recent bombings in and around the
city of Aleppo. The death toll there may be as high as 189,
according to an estimate of the Doctors Without Borders group.

The Syrian opposition is far from being blameless in the
conflict, Russia argues. Various rebel groups are regularly
engaged in
suicide bombings, kidnappings, torture
and mass
execution of civilians, among other crimes.

The UN deadlock comes as the international community is putting
its hopes in the Geneva-2 peace conference, scheduled for January
22, aimed at stopping the Syrian conflict. The meeting would
gather Syrian government and opposition, plus nations in the
region with an invested interest in ending the Syrian war and
leading world powers.

The UN Security Council has been criticized by some countries,
including the major sponsor of the Syrian opposition, Saudi
Arabia, over its failure to mandate a military intervention into
the conflict.

But a rare breakthrough was achieved in October, when the
Security Council approved a Russia-brokered deal, under which
Damascus agreed to dismantle its arsenal of chemical weapons.

The deal came after Washington threatened military action against
the Assad government over alleged cases of use of chemical
weapons by the Syrian army. An international probe into several
such cases confirmed that the toxic sarin gas was used on several
occasions, but failed to identify the perpetrators.